Now I am alone

CBC has an excellent radio show called Ideas, which is surprisingly high brow stuff. In particular, Ideas has been running a series based on McGill University’s Making Publics Project. CBC’s series of the same title has been tracing for listeners the origin of the modern public. It’s worth listening to from the beginning, but if you’re short on time, the last three episodes on Dutch painting, Elizabethan/Jacobean theater, and the formation of public through theater have all been especially worthwhile.

The last in particular is worth a listen if you’ve followed some of my blog posts on Allen Grossman’s The Sighted Singer. Grossman uses J.S. Mill’s idea that the speaker in lyric poetry is “overheard.” He is alone in his own mind, his own reverie, yet the lyric poet allows himself to be overheard by the audience, his readers. Compare this with the discussion in the Making Publics podcast about Hamlet’s famous soliloquy which begins “Now I am alone…” . In this, too, Hamlet self-consciously reveals his inner thoughts to an audience he does/n’t know is there. Perhaps this soliloquy is a proto-modern lyric?